ekg.md

Monitoring a Node with EKG

This tutorial assumes that you have installed cardano-node as explained here.

1. For security reasons, EKG can normally only be used to monitor a node running on the local machine. In order to monitor a node running on an AWS instance, we must work around this. We will use port forwarding in this tutorial: When we use Open SSL to connect to our instance, we can forward port 8080 on our local machine to port 12788 on the AWS instance as follows:

    ssh -L 8080:127.0.0.1:12788 -i <key-file> ec2-user@<domain>
   

2. On the AWS instance we change into the cardano-node folder again and delete the database-folder and the log-folder:

    cd cardano-node
    rm -rf db
    rm -rf logs
   

3. When we first started the node, we used the provided script scripts/mainnet.sh. In order to enable EKG, we will need to tweak the configuration, and for that it is better to start the node explicitly and work with our own copy of the configuration files:

    cfg=configuration/defaults/mainnet
    cp $cfg/configuration.yaml config.yaml
    cp $cfg/topology.json .
    cp $cfg/genesis.json .
   

   Now we can start the node at port 8080 with

    cardano-node run \
        --topology topology.json \
        --database-path db \
        --socket-path db/socket \
        --port 8080 \
        --config config.yaml
   

4. We locate the commented line

    # hasEKG: 12788
   

   in config.yaml and uncomment it:

    hasEKG: 12788
   

   We also uncomment the line

    # - EKGViewBK
   

   in section setupBackends.

    setupBackends:
      - KatipBK
      - EKGViewBK
    # - TraceForwarderBK
   

   This makes EKG monitoring information available at port 12788 (you can also change the port to something else if you like, just remember to modify SSH port forwarding accordingly in that case).

5. We then restart the node as explained above.

6. On our local machine, we can go to 127.0.0.1:8080 in our browser and see the EKG monitoring information.